I find this news disconcerting coming from such a large instance so early on. Many of the criticisms of Lemmy I’ve been fighting against on Reddit have had to do with defederation and the possibility of getting cut off from your favorite communities on your main account. I handwaved that away as being extremely unlikely save for the exception of NSFW or extreme political content. But this news has taken me quite by surprise. Perhaps I should have seen it coming given the community Beehaw is trying to foster.
This really makes me wonder what will happen to instances that make this decision. Will their communities diminish in favor of the more accessible ones? Will this decision hurt Beehaw in the long run? What does this mean for the Fediverse in the near future when fighting against its detractors has been such an uphill battle?
Thoughts?
About open registration: we had a debate about that too, but actually decided closed registration didn’t make that much sense because anyone can just go register on another instance and participate in our communities, so what was the point of gatekeeping registrations?
And ultimately that’s a very broad problem with the fediverse. Yes, you can curate your own local community all you want, but if you accept content and comments from the other parts of the fediverse, it’s actually a bigger moderation problem than something centralized. And there’s a liability problem: even if you police your own communities well, someone could subscribe to something unsavory across the web and you’re technically “hosting” it.
Federation isn’t easy to get right. Ultimately it makes moderation less scalable, not more, because every little instance has to moderate the whole fediverse.